On Saturday morning, the drive from our airport hotel out to Frisco takes the better part
of half an hour. It's a full 15 or 20 minutes, cruising down some wide Texas freeway in a Lyft operated by an
off-season UNT football player, before it occurs to me to ask what he knows
about JMU.
“That’s Virginia, right?” he says.
Yeah, I say. I’m on a fact-finding mission, wondering what the exposure for Duke Dogs and streamers and 21-16 is outside of our mid-atlantic bubble.
“There’s lots of coal mining and shit there, right?”
“Nah. That’s West Virginia,” Meghan and I both say at once.
“Oh.”
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
Silence.
Of all the days to have a meeting with the general manager
of your company, obviously I draw the morning of Friday, January 6. I’ve been
back in the world of newspapers for three months now, and its time for an
annual reflection on the state of print journalism. The nine people in my
office get together in our cramped conference room at 10am. We talk about an improving
sports section, about how our features were a touch weaker this year, about Virginia Press Award submissions, about how we'll redouble our efforts in this upcoming cycle.
Randy, our fair-minded, forty-something editor-in-chief, reminds us that print
sales lost 19 billion in revenue from 2005-2015, which spurs a generational
debate between young online gurus and old-school print writers. I'm somewhere in the middle, as usual, seeing the merits of both arguments.
By 12:30, I’ve put away my notepad and started the car. My copilot Meghan and I are off from the Valley to LaGuardia.
Wait, LaGuardia?
Yeah… LaGuardia. We saved about $1,000 in airplane fare by
hiking up the Valley to NYC. And since she splits an apartment in the Fan with
three friends, and clearly I’m not making six figures in a depreciating news
job (see: $19 billion in lost revenue), I’m willing to drive a few more hours for
the extra cash in my account at the end of the month.
Our 8pm flight is, predictably, delayed. We don’t leave the
city until ripping a few Maker’s Mark shots and spending 45 minutes at the
wrong gate. When we finally get to the right one, there’s a noticeable amount
of purple in line to board. This, I like.
We don’t get to our hotel room until after 2am. We collect
whatever sleep we can, then load up on coffee and beer at a Valero gas station
across the street. When the beer is paid for, Meghan calls for a Lyft.
Meghan and I get to Toyota stadium right around 9am, giving us two
hours to eat, drink, and be merry. If we`re all being honest here, most of us were
skipping out of the eating part in favor of getting National Champion-level
wasted. We're meeting up with a giant group of friends who hung around
my apartment during the Sunchase years (2011-2013). All arrived on a large
black party bus and parked it up against the edge of the blue lot, outside the
east gate. All are alumni. All root pretty aggressively.
photo credit: Keith Hart
It doesn’t take long – maybe 15 minutes or so – for this
tailgate to become one of the most surreal game day experiences I’ve ever had.
On our arrival, our friend Jim is in the middle of his eighth beer bong of the
morning. Football alums are present and numerous; Jacob and Evan Nicely, roommates
from the Sunchase era, both did work with the athletic department and are on
good terms with a lot of recent players. Jordan Stanton is hanging out, and
tells us that every single NFL Duke is here for the game… well, everyone except
Moats. We’ll have to give him a pass, since he and the Steelers had some
business to attend to the following day.
Later, Charlottesville's Daily Progress quotes Stanton, as he's on the field immediately following the game. "You did it! You're a national champion!" he yelled out while embracing Khalid Abdullah, per Ron Counts' Jan. 7 story.
It doesn't take long before other people are joining Khalid and Jordan on the field. Thousands of Dukes fans rush the field for JMU's ascendance as national champions.
If JMU's 2004 championship caught fans' attention, then this 2016 trophy might start an all-out rush to the bandwagon. JMU, a school whose fanbase I've always thought to be luke-warm, is in the midst of its most fervent fandom cycle ever. And it's pretty hard to miss the signposts, too. One Youngstown fan behind me who I struck up a conversation with at halftime asked if JMU always traveled this well. Well... no. So what gives?
Frankly, a lot of it is the younger audience. I wasn't at all surprised at how many 30-somethings I saw lining the tailgate lot, but I was straight-up shocked at how many recent grads made the trip down to Frisco. Part of that is an increasing visibility on the Internet -- my own wordtrap has existed for years, and JMU Sports Blog is even older, but there's been an explosion of "unofficial" JMU websites and Twitter accounts over the last 2-3 years.
Part of it is an increase in watchability, too. Mike Houston's 2016 squad exists at the apex of how entertaining football can be. The defense is disruptive, the offense is explosive, and both sides play to bruise the other team. You can't even skip the special teams plays and cut to the bathroom early, lest you miss JMU block a punt or return a kickoff.
Increased watchability goes back prior to Houston's arrival in Harrisonburg, too. To be fair to Everett Withers, even his all-offense, no-defense, party-in-the-endzone wax ball of frustration was fun to watch. It annoyed the hell out of us in games that mattered, but Vad and Co. were never boring.
And speaking of Vad, I ran into him while leaving the field. Friendly as ever, he was looking happy and healthy in the first row of the stadium. I couldn't tell if he was sitting there the whole game, or if he had just moved down after the game went final. I hope he was entrenched there from the first second of play -- if any former player deserves front row seats to watch JMU play for a championship, to watch this team win it all, it's the kid who set the table in the first place.
"Go Dukes," I said, holding up my fist in solidarity.
He gave me a big, teethy smile. "Go Dukes," he responded. It was quiet, but forceful.
Meghan and I hung out in the tailgate lots for an extra hour or so after the game, catching up with more friends, internet personalities, and the occasional friend-of-an-ex. But we were operating on borrowed time. We both needed to crash after the game, as all the alcohol and jet lag and running around were beginning to hit some sort of conscious-threatening critical mass. So we jaunted back to our hotel for a quick two-hour respite, then woke up and prepped for Round 2.
Later that afternoon, thousands of Dukes fans had swarmed a block in Frisco in The Shops at Legacy, celebrating the championship loudly and proudly. A big, cavernous bar called Scruffy Duffies -- kind of built like the Harrisonburg Macado's, if you moved the bar up against a wall and just left all that space open with hightop tables and chairs -- was a revolving door for purple-clad singers and dancers. After a few beers at the bar with the tailgate crew, I joined up with Sports Comm friends for most of the evening and watched a line that extended out the door from 6pm until after 1am when we left.
For a while, it was all JMU fans and alumni. But as the evening went on and Frisco natives started showing up, you could clearly tell they were all trying to figure out what was going on. A few even came up and asked me. "Are you guys having a convention in town or something?" Or, "where the hell is JMU?" Or, "why are there so many hot girls here?"
Sure, we drank the stadium out of beer, and JMU will hold a tenuous third-place spot in the Capital One Cup standings for a while, before the winter sports start crowning champions. There were a lot of fun parts of a weekend in Dallas, charging the field and unloading streamers in the stadium despite constant PA warnings not to. But one of the more undervalued parts of this weekend was the insane exposure JMU got. When College GameDay came to the Quad in 15 months ago, I saw a report that estimated the exposure for JMU was worth over $10 million. I'm not sure how much this weekend was worth, but I bet it was a lot.
The exposure is awesome, but I was completely unprepared for the response in the Harrisonburg community. I've talked openly about the conflicted relationship the city of Harrisonburg has with the University, and how JMU won't be able to take the next step beyond regional relevance without support from the Valley.
It's funny the cache a national championship will buy you.
If Harrisonburg and the Valley at large start to buy into JMU football as a destination event every fall. forget about it. That's the kind of thing that propels everything to the next level -- the Game Day experience, the tailgating scene, the reputation of the program. Everything.
JMU has everything in place to go on a multi-sport tear over the next several years. They've got the facilities. They've got the budget. They've got an incredible, undervalued communications department. Now, they're even getting the fans and the pedigree. The last 18 months of JMU athletics has been special, but it might be only the beginning.
"Wait a minute, I'm starting to remember something about your all's school," our friendly North Texas football Lyft driver says to us as we're leaving the highway and entering Frisco on Saturday morning. Suddenly, we could see purple garments lining every sidewalk.
"Don't you guys have a really awesome band?"
I smiled and nodded in the back of the car.
"Yeah, we do," I said. "But the football team's pretty damn good, too."
It doesn't take long before other people are joining Khalid and Jordan on the field. Thousands of Dukes fans rush the field for JMU's ascendance as national champions.
If JMU's 2004 championship caught fans' attention, then this 2016 trophy might start an all-out rush to the bandwagon. JMU, a school whose fanbase I've always thought to be luke-warm, is in the midst of its most fervent fandom cycle ever. And it's pretty hard to miss the signposts, too. One Youngstown fan behind me who I struck up a conversation with at halftime asked if JMU always traveled this well. Well... no. So what gives?
Frankly, a lot of it is the younger audience. I wasn't at all surprised at how many 30-somethings I saw lining the tailgate lot, but I was straight-up shocked at how many recent grads made the trip down to Frisco. Part of that is an increasing visibility on the Internet -- my own wordtrap has existed for years, and JMU Sports Blog is even older, but there's been an explosion of "unofficial" JMU websites and Twitter accounts over the last 2-3 years.
Part of it is an increase in watchability, too. Mike Houston's 2016 squad exists at the apex of how entertaining football can be. The defense is disruptive, the offense is explosive, and both sides play to bruise the other team. You can't even skip the special teams plays and cut to the bathroom early, lest you miss JMU block a punt or return a kickoff.
Increased watchability goes back prior to Houston's arrival in Harrisonburg, too. To be fair to Everett Withers, even his all-offense, no-defense, party-in-the-endzone wax ball of frustration was fun to watch. It annoyed the hell out of us in games that mattered, but Vad and Co. were never boring.
And speaking of Vad, I ran into him while leaving the field. Friendly as ever, he was looking happy and healthy in the first row of the stadium. I couldn't tell if he was sitting there the whole game, or if he had just moved down after the game went final. I hope he was entrenched there from the first second of play -- if any former player deserves front row seats to watch JMU play for a championship, to watch this team win it all, it's the kid who set the table in the first place.
"Go Dukes," I said, holding up my fist in solidarity.
He gave me a big, teethy smile. "Go Dukes," he responded. It was quiet, but forceful.
Meghan and I hung out in the tailgate lots for an extra hour or so after the game, catching up with more friends, internet personalities, and the occasional friend-of-an-ex. But we were operating on borrowed time. We both needed to crash after the game, as all the alcohol and jet lag and running around were beginning to hit some sort of conscious-threatening critical mass. So we jaunted back to our hotel for a quick two-hour respite, then woke up and prepped for Round 2.
Later that afternoon, thousands of Dukes fans had swarmed a block in Frisco in The Shops at Legacy, celebrating the championship loudly and proudly. A big, cavernous bar called Scruffy Duffies -- kind of built like the Harrisonburg Macado's, if you moved the bar up against a wall and just left all that space open with hightop tables and chairs -- was a revolving door for purple-clad singers and dancers. After a few beers at the bar with the tailgate crew, I joined up with Sports Comm friends for most of the evening and watched a line that extended out the door from 6pm until after 1am when we left.
For a while, it was all JMU fans and alumni. But as the evening went on and Frisco natives started showing up, you could clearly tell they were all trying to figure out what was going on. A few even came up and asked me. "Are you guys having a convention in town or something?" Or, "where the hell is JMU?" Or, "why are there so many hot girls here?"
Sure, we drank the stadium out of beer, and JMU will hold a tenuous third-place spot in the Capital One Cup standings for a while, before the winter sports start crowning champions. There were a lot of fun parts of a weekend in Dallas, charging the field and unloading streamers in the stadium despite constant PA warnings not to. But one of the more undervalued parts of this weekend was the insane exposure JMU got. When College GameDay came to the Quad in 15 months ago, I saw a report that estimated the exposure for JMU was worth over $10 million. I'm not sure how much this weekend was worth, but I bet it was a lot.
JMU had 1.562M viewers, which was ESPN2's biggest audience Saturday. Maryland basketball's win at Michigan averaged 821,000 viewers. https://t.co/oHJkZQ7CRD— John Ourand (@Ourand_SBJ) January 10, 2017
The exposure is awesome, but I was completely unprepared for the response in the Harrisonburg community. I've talked openly about the conflicted relationship the city of Harrisonburg has with the University, and how JMU won't be able to take the next step beyond regional relevance without support from the Valley.
It's funny the cache a national championship will buy you.
— JMUSports (@JMUSports) January 14, 2017
If Harrisonburg and the Valley at large start to buy into JMU football as a destination event every fall. forget about it. That's the kind of thing that propels everything to the next level -- the Game Day experience, the tailgating scene, the reputation of the program. Everything.
JMU has everything in place to go on a multi-sport tear over the next several years. They've got the facilities. They've got the budget. They've got an incredible, undervalued communications department. Now, they're even getting the fans and the pedigree. The last 18 months of JMU athletics has been special, but it might be only the beginning.
"Wait a minute, I'm starting to remember something about your all's school," our friendly North Texas football Lyft driver says to us as we're leaving the highway and entering Frisco on Saturday morning. Suddenly, we could see purple garments lining every sidewalk.
"Don't you guys have a really awesome band?"
I smiled and nodded in the back of the car.
"Yeah, we do," I said. "But the football team's pretty damn good, too."
